I remember the years of our slumber. Someone had wounded you, and you could not say.
A young man hung above you, in briar. Years happened. Fire. The wind blew the walls
away. I drifted in a spruce wood, bluebells matting
the acres. Go to Spain, you said. I went to Spain. The sea
was white where I traveled. Milk-deep. Brimming with opal. I smelled the darkening
pines of a mooring, the ripening cliffs of another. Something was rising
from the fathoms. I thought of rooms at the edge of a pasture, hornets
dismantling their rafters. Of a dark wave rising from your body, its music
in my hands, no harbor. Of the wind, of the word
of your hours, its hand clasped over its whisper, like a monk in a shattering
cloister. Of the horrible Archer in the star-lanes, laying his bow
on my whisper. Of his strength. Of the taste
of his armor. He was No One. He was never our father.
He was going to shoot me out farther where I could visit you no more.
12 The Paris-American
Joseph Fasano is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, due out from Cider Press in January, 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Yale Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Boston Review, and other publications. He won the 2008 RATTLEPoetry Prize for "Mahler in New York," and
he has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize, the
Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee. He teaches at Columbia University, among other institutions. About Fugue for Other Hands, Jeanne Marie Beaumont has written, "...this book embodies 'further, deeper, wilder'...it is never timid or tamed, has no easy comfort or uplift to offer but immerses us in the disturbances of living on this mortal earth from start to finish."
